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A Hot Topic turns Cold

My first assignment at Nesta was to find an interesting subject for a Hot Topic Event. Going through a few suggestions I came across a grant request to fund research into cold fusion reactors. Little did I know it would expose me to a side of science I didn’t think existed.

Scientists, I always believed, pride themselves on their logic and the scientific method. But it became apparent that in the case of cold fusion they let emotion stand in the way of progress, whatever direction that might be in. To understand the controversy and the effects of cold fusion, it’s worth understanding what happened when it was introduced to the world.

The History

Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons decided to test whether chemical processes could result into nuclear reactions. They had some promising initial results in 1989. According to their calorimetric measurements, heat had radiated from their apparatus and it could only be explained by fusion. Their theory was that they had managed to compress deuterium atoms in a palladium rod so that the atoms fused, releasing heat. They appropriately named their discovery Cold Fusion since “normal” fusion only takes place under extreme temperatures and pressures in the core of stars.

Still at a very early stage of experimentation, but massively excited, they found out that another group of nuclear physicists led by Professor Steven E. Jones were also researching cold fusion and were about to publish. Pons and Fleischmann needed to make a swift decision. Do they wait to complete their experiments and let a discovery that would change the world forever be credited to another group of scientists or risk it and publish with incomplete experimental evidence?

They choose the latter and on 23 March 1989 before their paper was even published the University of Utah organised a televised press conference.

What happened in the days that followed can only be describe as chaos. Journalists and scientists alike clamoured for details of the invention they were promised would change the world. But information was scarce; Pons and Fleischmann refused to provide anything further and when their paper was finally published, it was filled with inaccuracies.

Only a few groups out of the many who tried claimed they replicated the results of the original experiment and even those didn’t provide conclusive data. A year went by and when the smoke settled the scientific community seemed to have reached a consensus. Pons and Fleischmann’s claims were not based on solid evidence and their results could not be replicated.

The professors who were once considered experts in their fields had lost their credibility and mainstream science had all but given up on the concept of cold fusion.

That doesn’t mean Cold Fusion has disappeared, it’s just gone underground. With a new name and a desire to leave its stained past behind, Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR) has slowly been creeping back into public discussion.

Over the last two decades conferences have been taking place all over the world trying to bring together LENR believers and exchange ideas. People such as Andrea Rossi say that they will soon have LENR reactors ready for commercial use. NASA is discussing its uses as an Energy Source for zero carbon aircraft. The US Department of Energy is now accepting proposals to fund LENR research and Mitsubishi have recently been granted a patent for LENR technology to be used for the transmutation of nuclear waste.

Despite all these, LENR is still far from a proven concept. It is highly controversial and the main reason for this is that papers that offer positive results are vague about the methods they use and lack solid data.

The emotional effect

Leaving aside the matter of whether LENR is real or not, I wanted to hold an event on the scientific community’s aversion towards cold fusion – on the attitudes around the science, not the science itself. There was and still is an emotional response, embedded in the scientific community’s psyche, when it comes to Cold Fusion. Perhaps one of the best examples of this is Julian Schwinger’s efforts to publish his theories on the Pons-Fleischmann experiments.

Julian Schwinger won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965 for his theory of quantum electrodynamics. The calls of even a man of his stature fell on deaf ears.

The effect on scientists doesn’t seem to have died down as the years have gone by. The long shadow of events in 1989 seems to have been passed down to the younger generation. I got a sense of this myself from some of the responses I got to my speaker invitations. Despite our efforts to show that we did not want to have a discussion on whether LENR should be taken seriously or not, their unwillingness to even be associated with such as an event was apparent.

Even science journalists were hesitant about speaking

“Youch – I wouldn’t want to talk about this. And there’s your reaction, right there ;)”

And even writing about it

“If we were to write an article about the science of it, it might add an amount of credibility that I’m not comfortable doing while that’s still the case.”

When inviting physicists, I found that they were more inclined to fill their responses with data and evidence that disproves LENR claims. LENR supporters were extremely pleased as they considered the fact that we wanted to hold this event a sign of LENR breaking into the mainstream. Both of these responses ignore the fact that all we wanted to talk about was the emotional effects of the technology and not get caught up on the debate of whether it’s good research or not.

There is no denying that bad science has played a factor in the way people feel towards cold fusion. The technology might have had a turbulent lifespan, but it has been a long lifespan – the idea refuses to go away. That is what makes it different from other examples of bad science. It is a fair bet to say that it won’t be going anywhere for a while.

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Comments

27 June 2014

Samuel,

Cold Fusion developers rarely share their secrets with their competitors, often because they rely on fundings but that is changing because more and more scientists are aligning with Live Open Science, an initiative from MFMP. (Martin Fleischmann Memorial Project)

The MFMP streams their data / experiments in real time over the internet and they are inviting the public the participate.

More and more, leading scientists within Cold Fusion is supporting this initiative and shares knowledge, technology and catalysts through this organisation.

Their webpage is www.quantumheat.org - I highly recommend those interested in Cold Fusion to read up a bit on their research.

The story of F&P is more complex, and even if you are mositive it is hard not to be influenced by the mass of errors and insults.

Fleischmann factually was one of the best electrochemist of history, and his calorimetry on cold fusion is great art, and is whatever the myth say, unchallenged.
His story is well described in one of the most documented book : Excess Heat by Charles Beaudettehttp://iccf9.global.tsinghua.edu.cn/lenr%20home%20page/acrobat/Beaudette...
If you want not to ridicule yourself talking of 1989-1996 period, this is the book to read. (another book to read is The Science of Low Energy Nuckear Reaction by Edmund Storms, chich is more scientific, and recent)

Beaudette book explains well that in 2000 there was only 4 written critic which were all refuted.
The critic of Lewis and Hansen were refuted many times including by the last critic of Wilson. Morisson was so incoherent that refutation was more a dismissal. Wilson was competent, and his remarks have been integrated in Fleischmann following work. However despite his affirmation, his paper confirmed the most powerful events.

So to be synthetic, as Beaudette explain, the calorimetry of F&P is unchallenged, and his work have been replicated in numerous and varied ways.
However the theoretical consideration, and come conspiracy theory (like myth of loose work, bad peer review, incompetence) , based on no evidence, or ignoring evidences, have dominated the debate.

Beaudette explains well that calorimetry was abandonned by physicists in the 50s and that if it took 1 year for chemist to replicated cold fusion properly, it too twice that time for the only nuclear physicist who was trained by Heinz Gerischer on electro-chemistry and calorimetry.

The physicist asked for nuclear byproducts to accept it was nuclear. Chemist have proven that heat is produced much above anything chemical, proving it is nuclear.
However physicist who don't master that technology, asked for other by-product that they master better, like tritium and neutrons. There are some, but 10millions less than expected.

Evidence of He4 was produced later, and is much less reproduced (Miles+Bush, McKubre, ENEA DeNinno) and precise than heat.
Tritiums is clear but below expected quantity, for physicist that assumed that cold fusion was the normal hot fusion.

More than that they asked for an easy experiment, and a quick evidence... Chemist were experienced with difficulst experiments taking years to be reproduced, with complex context and hidden parameters... Physicist imagines it was simple, deterministic and quick like their experiments...
Cold Fusion is like micro-electronics, high temperature ssuperconductors, mammal cloning, plane... it fails often before success, and even more before you understand whay it failed...

It seems ENEA with SRI and NRL joint work, have advanced in finding the last requirements on palladium metallurgy, crystallography, on impurities...

It have however no credible theory, nor any credible theoretical refutation (it can be compatible with current science, just not with current habits).
Edmund Storms, the LENR editor of NaturWissenschaften propose a way to build the theory from existing science and experimental results :http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/StormsEexplaining.pdf
his theory is young, but the approach is good!

The problem until few years was that it was a lab curiosity.
Even LENR scientists were quite conservative in their protocols.

The breakthrough was to use Nickel Hydrogen reaction instead of Palladium-Deuterium, and using gas permeation in powders instead of electrolysis.

Now there are less scientific question about inventors, entrepreneurs, whether crook or innovators... Maddoff or Edison. Rossi seems well reconized by serious players today (Cherokee fund, Elforsk)...
Brillouin is supported by SRI, which work for Navy/DoD...

Congratulations on picking a truly hot topic! I've been following the LENR quest for about six months, a short time compared to many of the people that post on www.e-catworld.com. I was originally searching for information about a natural gas vehicle when I noticed a commenter had left a cryptic message for readers like me. "Wait for LENR," was the simple but curious message that caused me to embark on my individual quest for information about this hot, no pun intended, topic.
It's important to realize that LENR has been verified many times by professional scientist many hundreds of times, perhaps thousands of times since the historic announcement in 1989. It's not perfect science yet but in my quest I've discovered that the computer chip was a hard nut to crack at first. It required millions of dollars to unleash the secrets that would greatly influence us today. Presently, LENR is that way.
LENR is like a baby in swaddling clothes that can live or die. An interesting title for a book would be, "The Death of Cold Fusion," but despite repeated attempts to drown this baby it keeps fighting for breath. The ones that keep dunking the baby care little for society and only seek to continue to control us by controlling the energy that we use.
It's time that we put our faith in people like Andrea Rossi and Robert Godes and not government toadies that prevent the advancement of this technology. The Japanese companies of Mitsubishi, Toyota, and Hitachi are working with LENR and have proven that transmutation, via LENR, works. Swartz/Hagelstein at MIT have proven technology that works.
Each time that I pass a gas station and see the price go up every time a canary farts in the wrong direction in the Middle East, I wonder how much longer will the sheep continue to bleat. I wonder when we, the sheep, will finally shrug off our coats of wool and begin to howl.
Finally, thank you Mr. Meli for embracing the topic of LENR! Please don't drop this topic from your roster of issues to write about because we need brave journalist such as yourself. The world needs to know about this fantastic technology!
Be the wolf!

I thank the writer of this blog post for his fair and balanced coverage of the LENR topic, and the reactions it causes. By trying to host an event related to this controversial topic, you have experieced a good sample of what the people that gets involved in this goes through in their everyday lifes. I hope that in a near future you will be able to host this event, and it will be a tremendous success.

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